Monday, November 10, 2008

Acceptable lies...

For those of you who haven't been to the palatial Miller estate, I'll let you in on a little secret. We live in a pile of leaves. Oak leaves, maple leaves, leaves from trees that I don't know the names of. In the summer those leaves shade our home from the burning sun and screen our yard from the neighbors. The trees that the leaves are attached to are magnificent. Great big, tall, strong trees that hypnotically sway in the wind. The trees (and the leaves) are one of the reasons we bought this house.

All that romantic stuff aside, it is November in Virginia and all those leaves have begun to fall. No, falling really isn't the right word for it. The leaves in our yard have started a blizzard. I mean there are times that you look out of the window into our backyard and you can't even see to the end of our yard. Sometimes I'm afraid that the Miller family dog is going to get lost out there and we'll never see her again.

So on Sunday, the Miller family manly man strapped on what he calls his "jet pack" leaf blower and proceeded to try and clear out the yard. God bless him, it took him three straight hours to get those pretty leaves pushed back into the woods. He came in covered in dust, sweaty and exhausted.

Mark called me from work a little bit ago. He does that, just to say hello. He asked me if I could still tell that he had spent all that time in the yard yesterday. I looked over the back of the couch and out the window into the back yard, and as the blizzard of leaves obscured my view, I said "The yard looks great, honey!" I guess a little lie won't hurt him.